This specification relates media surveys.
Advertisers often advertise on both the Internet and television. With respect to Internet advertising, advertisers can participate in auctions for placement of advertisements with search result or on web pages of particular content, or can reserve placements of advertisements in advance. With respect to television advertisements, advertisers purchases airtime during a television broadcast to air television advertisements.
A common performance metric for advertisements is impressions. As used herein, an impression is a counting of a viewing of an advertisement. For web-based advertisements, the impressions and actions taken can be readily tracked by advertisers, advertising management systems, and the web page publishers. For television advertisements, there are systems that analyze reporting logs of set top boxes and the like to enable the counting of impressions. These systems define one or more criteria for viewing interactions that must be met to count an impression. For example, a system that processes set top logs reported by set top boxes may only count an impression when the viewing device is tuned to a broadcast stream in which an advertisement is inserted during the advertisement spot, and the viewing device remains tuned to the broadcast stream for N consecutive seconds during the actual display time of the insertion.
While such systems can accurately determine whether an advertisement was shown on particular television or computer, it is nevertheless difficult to determine with absolute certainty that a viewer actually viewed an advertisement. For example, the viewer may have left the room during a television commercial break and returned after the sponsor programming resumed.
In addition to impressions, advertisers are also very interested in the effectiveness of their advertisements and/or advertising campaigns. For example, advertisers often want to know how many times they need to show an advertisement to a person in a target demographic before the person will be remember the brand name. One technique for evaluating the effectiveness of an advertisement and/or advertising campaign is to survey an audience for advertisement recognition and brand linkage. The measure of advertisement recognition can, for example, be based on the percentage of a survey audience that recognizes the advertisement, and the measure of brand linkage can, for example, be based on the percentage of the survey audience that correctly identifies the featured product and/or brand of the advertisement.
To process the surveys accurately and efficiently, advertisers prefer to survey individuals whose viewing habits are known with respect to particular advertisements. For example, the accuracy of findings from the survey results is increased if the advertiser knows which of viewers being surveyed actually saw the advertisement, how many times each viewer saw the advertisement, and which viewers being surveyed did not see the advertisement. Unfortunately, many viewers need to be surveyed because their viewing habits are not known a priori. Thus, to ensure a large enough sample of relevant viewers are surveyed, the number of viewers that must be contacted is far in excess of the minimum sample set size. Accordingly, unless the advertising campaign is truly enormous, a standard practice of random-digit-dialing to find people who were exposed to the advertisements and are willing to take surveys will have an extremely high miss rate, making the survey process inefficient for all but the largest campaigns
Likewise, it is difficult to obtain an accurate exposure count, as the clarity and length of recall induced by advertising depends significantly on the number of times a prospective customer was exposed to the advertisement. It is difficult for viewers to accurately recall, when prompted during a survey, the number of times they may have viewed the advertisement. Furthermore, these errors can introduce false negatives, i.e., people who were exposed but do not remember the exposure, and people who were not exposed but incorrectly recall an exposure.
Current surveys also require significant scheduling and management overhead. To minimize the difficulties described above, advertisers often need to generate media plans solely for getting accurate recall data. For example, advertisers schedule specific spot counts in different demographic marketing areas (DMAs), rather than running a media plan that they would expect to be most effective.
Finally, if an advertiser is partnering with a third party survey operator to perform recall surveys, various aspects of the advertising campaign, e.g., flighting dates and the creative itself, must be communicated to the survey operator so that they can be processed into a set of questions and a service management plan. This requires additional overhead and expense.